By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Monica, the daughter of Plaszow commandant Amon Goeth, who was born after Goeth was hanged, said: I would say to all those fathers, who do all those things, think about children. Not of the children of others. Of your own children, how they will live, what they will think of you.
In 1942 Berlin, a family receives good news: daddy has been promoted.
True, they have leave their house, the best house ever was, as the son, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), points out, but maybe their new home will have a garden as well as new school and friends.
Maybe the growing tension in the house, at this time mostly between Bruno’s Grandmother and his dad, will diminish with distance. Bruno doesn’t like family conflicts.
The new house certainly has a garden, well guarded by men in uniforms with dogs on short leashes, but there is no new school or friends. Bruno’s new world has closed borders.
Daddy (David Thewlis) has been made a commandant of a concentration camp. Or more precisely, an extermination camp for Jews.
At eight years old, Bruno is far too young to grasp the realities. For him the people in the fields are just oddly dressed farm workers. Pavel, the house servant, a kind man, who is as afraid of the resident Gestapo members as is Bruno,is also odd. Bruno is lonely and anxious because the difficulties between his parents are growing. He does not understand the diaspora that is opening between his dad and his mom who is driven nearly to madness by what her husband is doing.
Bruno does what any child at that age would: he explores the forbidden outside. His curiosity brings him to the concentration camp’s fence. Behind the fence a boy of his own age, Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), spends his days bewildered and shamed by the fact that he’s a Jew. Shmuel understands fear, work and loneliness well, but the larger reality is as unreal to him as it is to his new friend, Bruno.
They play ball and games, Bruno brings Shmuel food.
Outside their childhood capsule, the world plays much crueler game with human lives. Pavel (David Hyman) is beaten to death by sadistic young lieutenant Kotler (Rupert Friend), practically next to the family’s dinner table. Shmuel is severely beaten by Kotler as well. Kotler is send to Eastern front after the commandant finds out that the lieutenant’s father emigrated to Switzerland.
The wife(Vera Farmiga), like the commandant’s Mother, cannot bear her progressively crueler, more inhuman husband, or the proximity of the camp. She wants to leave this place, and her husband. She wants her children far away from the poison of propaganda that is already changing her daughter.
And Bruno, ashamed, tries to make it up to his friend Shmuel by joining him in the camp to help him to search for his vanished father.
Without showing any blood, all the killings are off screen, this is indescribably cruel story. It is also one of the most human stories about concentration camps I have ever seen. When Pavel, a doctor in his former life, bandages Bruno’s scrapped knee, the fear that passes between him and Bruno’s Mother, before she thanks him, is palpable. Everybody is afraid, all the time, of everybody else. Uncertainty and daily terror, nightmares of what the future might bring are astoundingly well rendered.
The shot of a man in gas mask looking down into the gas chamber before he pours in the cyanide is chillingly memorable. Is this what so many people saw two minutes before their horrible death? This could never be forgotten or forgiven.
This is not war, or terror, seen through the eyes of children as we expect. This is terror invading their lives, changing them, while they do not comprehend it.
The implication of lives lived during evil times are far reaching. The officials, who live and perform evil in this film, do it with the same ease as those Bush's administrators who told brutally raped American woman that there is no legal way to prosecute the guards who savagely raped and beat her because they are private contractors. Or those on Wall Street who stole people’s savings, retirement money, homes and lives. Evil is evil. Scale does not apply.
It is an excellent and brave film. Director Mark Herman treats the subject with unusual finesse, the innocent questions and naïve lack of comprehension of the kids contrasting with the callous, accepted brutality, cruelty and indifference of the adults. The slow breaking down of human psyche, the captor’s not the captive, due to his own sins. Waiting for the relentless coming of the payoff.
Either Mark Herman is an exceptional “actor’s” director, or he is lucky with casting. They just are all good, indeed very good. Both boys are faultless, Vera Farmiga is fantastic, but so is David Thewlit’s disintegrating humanity. It is necessary for the film that all the character are utterly believable, and the actors seems to just slip into their parts as naturally and effortlessly as possible, showing the audience just what humans are capable off.
Which is, I am afraid, why it got no Oscar nominations. Reality is not welcome on the red carpet.
It is beautifully shot, starting with a cheerful spring day in Berlin full of red swastikas and kids playing planes- the bombardiers Stukas, I believe, to the forbidding house, and the camp's scenes. This is a camera that tells the story as an integral component.
I admired and valued The Reader, but it takes a film like this to realize just how refined films can be. How much more subtle, telling, warning and observant films could, and should be.
May we see more of your works, Mark Herman, soon.
The film is based on book by John Boyne.
